UPDATE 1:57 CT: Amid the bug fixes in the latest server patch notes released by EA comes the incredibly important word that EA has "disabled Cheetah speed," the fastest simulation speed setting. Games set to Cheetah will now run at the noticeably slower Llama speed.

Presumably this is to give the servers more time to process the thousands of simultaneous city simulations that are all feeding into its global and regional networks. In any case, this is a core piece of the gameplay that's now being hampered by EA's continuing server problems; in my 16 or so hours playing the game, I'd estimate 15 or so have been spent running at Cheetah. Slowing things down, even temporarily, is likely to impact a whole lot of players negatively.

In other news, Amazon has stopped offering the PC download edition of SimCity, and is now warning shoppers that "many customers are having issues connecting to the 'SimCity' servers." on its product page, directing those concerned to EA's customer support.

ORIGINAL STORY

Those hoping that EA would quickly solve the server problems plaguing SimCity since its US launch Tuesday won't be happy with the publisher's latest news. Community Manager LadyCoconut announced this morning that EA is rolling out a server hotfix that improves stability but also "disables a few non-critical gameplay features (leaderboards, achievements, and region filters)."

None of the affected features are really central to the SimCity experience, but it's not an encouraging sign that EA is finding it necessary to scale back the game's capabilities as it struggles to keep up with server demand.

The feature rollback follows rolling patch deployments that temporarily shut down all servers yesterday and what EA describes as "heavy traffic" yesterday evening. "We are aggressively undergoing maintenance on the servers and adding capacity to meet demand," LadyCoconut posted in a middle-of-the-night message. "Performance will fluctuate during this process. Our fans are important to us, and we thank you for your continued patience."

Last night, Senior Producer Kip Katsarelis admitted to being upset. "Technical issues have become more prominent in the last 24 hours," Katsarelis noted. "We are hitting a number of problems with our server architecture which has seen players encountering bugs and long wait times to enter servers. This is, obviously, not the situation we wanted for our launch week and we want you to know that we are putting everything we have at resolving these issues."

Katsarelis promised the team would be rolling out even more servers in the next two days and is working hard to roll out more updates to fix any bugs that pop up. That said, he also noted the game has been immensely popular, with 38 million buildings plopped down in a single 24-hour period by players who were able to use the existing server architecture.

Meanwhile, customers in Japan and Australia are now able to download the game launcher ahead of the official release. That's a step in the right direction as EA works to avoid repeating the same problems for the game's international launch, though players will still have to download a massive update after the local game servers are officially turned on.

Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl

So they removed every token reason to be online in a singleplayer game? It would probably be less expensive for EA to just let people authenticate once and play offline indefinitely then to invest so heavily in firefighting efforts and coding effort to fix flaky server. It would sure make paying customers a hellovalot happier.

None of the affected features are really central to the SimCity experience, but it's not an encouraging sign that EA is finding it necessary to scale back the game's capabilities as it struggles to keep up with server demand.

They're not critical, so they'll be adding an offline single player sandbox mode right?

Not trolling, just pointing out the cognitive dissonance. Although I suppose this is Ars' point of view, and not EA's.

If only there was a way that EA could offload some of these features to the local client. Something that could help lighten the load on the central servers. Now what was that concept called again... I keep forgeting.

At the rate they're going I don't think EA will need to bring new servers online as droves of players seem to be leaving the game and getting refunds already. Well, no, they should bring one new server up, just so they can point to it and say "We did everything we could, but the IP just isn't as strong as it used to be" when they axe this part of the franchise.

The first rule of anything that requires everyone to log in to a server (for legitimate or dubious reasons) is that it's not going to work and be a debacle. This has basically been a constant for the past decade.

At the rate they're going I don't think EA will need to bring new servers online as droves of players seem to be leaving the game and getting refunds already.

I'd love to believe that's true, but is it even possible to get a refund for the game?

As for EA, well, they did this to themselves, so I have less than no sympathy. I have glee, actually.

As for the people suffering because of it, well, honestly, no sympathy there, either, as this was pretty well publicized and the entirely obvious and inescapable outcome of the always-online DRM. If you support that kind of feature by buying the game, well, you reap what you sow.

So they removed every token reason to be online in a singleplayer game? It would probably be less expensive for EA to just let people authenticate once and play offline indefinitely then to invest so heavily in firefighting efforts and coding effort to fix flaky server. It would sure make paying customers a hellovalot happier.

No, they didn't. The main reason of being online is sharing a simulation of resources between cities. That is still in place.

If only there were some other "feature" that could be disabled in a game most people want to play single-player that would alleviate strain on the server the game connects to any time someone starts (or attempts to start) the game, whether playing single-, multi- or anyotherkindof-player mode. I'm sure there must be something I'm missing...

The sad part about all of this, and what usually happens when draconian DRM gets in the way of enjoying a game, is piraters will strip out the DRM, strip out the need to be online, and basically make the game playable, and those who pirate the game will get the better version. Those who paid , on the other hand, will get a version that treats them like criminals.

So they removed every token reason to be online in a singleplayer game?

Not really. The online 'mechanics' - each city influences your region, you can outsource production of some resources to other cities in your region, etc - are still there.

Of course, that wouldn't be any sort of a valid justification if it weren't for them making the city areas so incredibly tiny (even the smallest SC4 plots seem larger) so that you couldn't put everything in you need to make a self-sufficient city.

Can someone explain why these problems are not tested for prior to release? Clearly server stability is important in online games, is it simply impossible to test what happens when a large number of machines access a network? Is this just an untapped market niche or is it simply infeasible?

I had a feeling this would happen. Remember, if you don't support always on DRM from the get go, don't buy the game. Your money is your vote. There are plenty of great games out there that don't require an always on connection.